Becoming Martian

By Josh Richards

Join physicist, comedian and astronaut candidate Josh Richards on a humorous and informative journey to the red planet. Blending science, engineering and ethics with comedy, and filled with real life stories of life beyond Earth's atmosphere, Becoming Martian looks at how colonising Mars will change humans in body, mi

• Language: English
• Publisher: LaunchPad Speaking
• Release date: Aug 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780648135616

Josh Richards

Josh Richards is one of 100 global candidates for the Mars One Project - a mission to establish a permanent human presence on Mars by launching astronauts to the red planet one-way. After spells as a combat engineer, naval diver, commando, physicist, blasting specialist, fine art technician, and stand-up comedian, Josh finally turned his attention to his childhood dream of going to space. Since 2012, he's spoken in hundreds of schools, universities, and businesses about how humanity will become a multi-planetary species, and how exploring other planets will improve life for those who remain on Earth. He's also the author of Becoming Martian - a humorous look at how colonising Mars will change humans in body, mind and soul. He's currently based in Melbourne but looks forward to moving to Mount Gambier to pursue another life-threatening passion: cave diving.

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Becoming Martian by Josh Richards

Copyright © 2017 by Josh Richards. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

Books may be purchased by contacting the publisher and author at:

www.becomingmartian.com  and www.joshrichards.space

Published by LaunchPad Speaking

Editors: Kate Iselin, Shelley Richards, Lisa Stojanovski

Cover Design & Artwork: Adam Peter Scott

ISBN: 978-0-648135-60-9

1. Science 2. Wit/Humor

First Edition

Printed in Australia

Becoming Martian

Josh Richards

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Acknowledgements

It’s genuinely embarrassing how long I’ve been talking about writing this book - from the seed of an idea in late 2012, to an astronaut application in 2013, a jumbled mess of half-written ideas in 2014, the madness of being shortlisted in 2015, thrashing out in 2016 exactly  why   I signed up for a one-way mission to Mars, to finally being here . I may finally have put the words to paper, but what you’re really reading here is the product of an entire tribe of people lending some truly incredible support. There is absolutely no way I would have been able to write about how humanity will change in body, mind and soul by colonising Mars without staying with some amazingly generous friends - thank you so much to Chris and Yolanda in Perth, Joanne and Peter in Mudgee, Jess in Hawaii, and Ben and Cariann in LA for giving a ukulele-carrying space nomad shelter to write this.

This book’s stunning cover design is thanks to Adam Peter Scott, who has taken many of my half-thought out design ideas and turned them into incredible posters and book covers ever since I started down the path to Mars in 2013. Thank you again Adam - I’m always amazed by your work, and look forward to putting it on the cover of many more books in the future.

There’s also no way this book have been possible without my Carl Sagan supporters on Patreon too: James Nelson, Dianne McGrath, Pull2g, Fay Wells, Mary Austin, Ross Hayes, and Megan Papiccio. Your incredible patronage drives me to keep writing every day, to share things I might otherwise hide, and are the reason I can afford to write and eat! Thank you for your support, and I can’t wait to share the development of my future projects with you just as I have in the writing of this book.

This entire book would still be a barely readable mess without three incredible editors though. I’m eternally grateful for Kate Iselin’s talent at re-arranging my sentences into something sensible, for Lisa Stojanovski’s relentless fact-checking and astounding knowledge of everything space, and for the proof-reading superpowers of Shelley Richards (Mum). You’re three of the most amazing people I know, and I’m forever grateful you each gave so much to turn this jumble of words into something to be proud of.

This book simply wouldn’t have been possible without each and every one of you - thank you so much for believing in me.

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Martian Body

Sitting on the edge of the couch, mouth agape, I was staring at the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She smiled softly, floating  before me like a flame-haired goddess. Without warning another passenger appeared from the right of the screen, seemingly on a collision course with this perfect being, but with just the slightest push of her finger she sent him spinning away again into the distance. This floating ginger Diana turned back to me, smiled that most glorious of smiles, then effortlessly sailed away out of frame like a dream. Abruptly, the scene changed to a shot of strangers in blue jumpsuits bouncing weightlessly around inside a padded aircraft, with the sounds of angels singing in my head slowly fading back to the overly enthusiastic American narrator describing parabolic flight training... and she was gone.

For weeks I'd been tirelessly working my way through a documentary series on the challenges of sending humans to Mars, and to be honest the eye-candy was generally dismal. No disrespect to the likes of Professor Paul Delaney or Dr Robert Zubrin, but after literally hours of watching aging white men talk to the camera about the finely-tuned personality dynamics required for deep space exploration, I was yet to see much evidence of this mixed gender crew everyone was so keen to send to Mars. My initial, primal, Who are you and will you bear my children? response to the floating redhead subsided, and as I picked myself up from the puddle I'd formed on the floor, I had  a horrible, dawning realisation: if I were ever to actually meet this majestic space unicorn, it would probably be while I was stuck to the floor of an aircraft during a 2g climb, hurling up breakfast into one of those sarcastically labelled Motion Sickness Discomfort Bags, impotently waving my arms around like a sea turtle stranded on its back while she told me she didn't date other gingers because of the in-flight fire hazard.

You see, weightlessness isn't all champagne, floating red hair, and Strauss's Blue Danube. You might gape slack-jawed at the wondrous freedom of micro-gravity from the comfort of your lounge room, but modern humans have also spent the last 2.8 million years eating, shuffling, and shagging in the consistent pull of Earth's gravity. So while your mind is buzzing at the idea of zero-g backflips, the rest of your body should immediately start screaming AHHHHHHHH!!! WHY?! Hang on, I think I've got - NOPE, MOTHER OF MONKEY ZEUS, WHAT EVEN IS THIS? WHY CAN I TASTE PURPLE RIGHT NOW?

At the start of the 1950's Gemini program, NASA wanted its future astronauts to have a tiny taster of what micro-gravity is like. The idea was that they would get a sense of how to move themselves and their equipment around without the binding embrace of gravity while also observing how their bodies reacted to the changing forces. So they ripped all the seats out of a C-131 Samaritan military cargo plane, covered the cabin with white cushions so it looked like a padded white cell with a curved roof, and then started flying this winged roller-coaster through the sky on what was benignly referred to as parabolic flights.

Just seconds from filling their helmets with carrots and peas

[Credit: NASA]

Each parabola is broken into two parts that are filled with wildly different levels of joy and despair. For the first 90 seconds of the flight, the aircraft climbs at a rather aggressive 45 degrees, at which point you'll be stuck to the floor with nearly twice the force of gravity trying to force your stomach out through your back. But as the aircraft reaches 35,000 feet, the pilot gently arcs the plane out of the climb and straight into a 45 degree dive, so that for about 25 to 30 seconds your body is still moving up while the plane arcs downwards. Done at the right speed, you and your fellow passengers will be weightless, which is great, because now instead of your stomach trying to come out of your back it's lurching forward trying to float in front of you. Delicious. You then go back into a 45 degree climb to do it all again: over a standard two- to three-hour NASA training flight, the aircraft will do 40 to 60 of these parabolas. I’ll leave it to you to guess why, sixty years later, astronauts still refer to these flights as the Vomit Comet.

Motion sickness in a deliciously nifty diagram

[Credit: NASA]

In the mid-70s, NASA replaced the original C-131s with two KC-135 Stratotankers that stayed in service until 2004. Much like everything that survived the 80's, NASA even tried slapping on some shoulder pads and skin-tight lycra by renaming the Stratotankers  the Weightless Wonders, but to no effect. The Vomit Comet nickname has lived on like the Dread Pirate Roberts of motion sickness. Later, in the nineties, there was even an attempt later to rename the aircraft the Dream Machines as part of another sexy rebranding, but unless your idea of a sexy dream resembles a David Lynch-esque nightmare where re-tasting the spaghetti bolognese you had a few hours earlier forms an important part of a bizarre erotic fantasy involving the Log Lady...chances are you're still going to have a bad time no matter what the aircraft is called.

Of course, sexy rebranding isn’t a bad thing when it might genuinely reduce passenger fears. According to John Yaniec - lead test director of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Program for 15 years - anxiety is the biggest contributor to air sickness among passengers, and the chances of re-visiting lunch seem to follow a rule of thirds: one third violently ill, the next third moderately ill, and the final third not at all, which also matches up pretty closely to how Ron Howard and the stars of Apollo 13 fared while filming the movie's weightless scenes. Over ten days, 612 parabolas, and four hours of cumulative weightlessness, the scorecard showed Gary Sinise and Kevin Bacon regularly filling their vomit bags, and Tom Hanks and Ron Howard feeling green but managing to keep it all down. But Bill Paxton? He was zooming around, grinning, without a care in the world on every parabola, and I can only hope he was also having flashbacks to playing Private Hudson in Aliens and occasionally screaming, We’re on an express elevator to hell, going down! WOOOO HOOOO!.

So, it's not all airborne despair; nor do you have to be a trainee astronaut or a Hollywood star to experience weightlessness on a parabolic flight. For everyday civilians wanting to get a tiny taste of space, a 90-100 minute flight aboard Zero-G Corporation’s G-Force One  might be as close to the full physiological nightmare of weightlessness as you might be able to get. Founded in 2004 by Peter Diamandis, astronaut Byron Lichtenberg and NASA engineer Ray Cronise, the Zero-G corporation offers regular parabolic flights all over the US for a cool $5000US per person, and thankfully, they also do it with a surprisingly low vomit ratio. It seems most people are okay for about the first 15 parabolas, but then start to go green at around 20, and the cascade hurling is usually in full force by the 25th. So instead of subjecting paying customers to a 3-4 hour flight involving 40-60 parabolas like NASA does to its astronauts, Zero-G avoids the dry-cleaning by only performing 12-15 parabola over a flight. It might only equate to about 5-6 minutes of weightlessness, but a slew of ex-girlfriends will attest this is plenty of time for someone like me to have fun and make an idiot of myself in front of dozens of people we don’t know. Unfortunately I’m yet to experience a parabolic flight myself, because if I had I probably wouldn’t be writing a book about going to Mars: I’d be sitting on a porch playing banjo and enjoying domestic bliss with my curly-haired ginger wife and our half dozen soulless ginger children.

Medically speaking, the nausea of motion sickness stems from a mismatch between what we're seeing, and what the tiny loops of fluid in our inner ear - the vestibular system - are telling the brain. If your inner ear is saying you're spinning and bouncing around but your eyes say you're not moving (like when you're inside a parabolic aircraft), then your brain thinks you've been poisoned and gets your hurling reflex cranking to rid your body of the poison it assumes you’ve consumed. Likewise, if your inner ear says you're standing perfectly still but your eyes believe the world has been flipped upside down, you're also probably going to be tasting lunch twice too.